SOURCE: White, Lawrence Grant. “Beyond Civilization.” Saturday Review of Literature 30, no. 16 (19 April 1947): 12.

In the following positive review of Christ Stopped at Eboli, White contends that Levi “has proved his competence by making a readable and interesting book out of grim and forbidding material.”

[Christ Stopped at Eboli] is a well-written account, by a sensitive and cultivated anti-fascist, of a year spent as a political exile at Gagliano, a primitive and remote village in Lucania, which forms the ankle of the Italian peninsula. Here civilization had hardly penetrated. The natives said that “Christ stopped at Eboli,” a town in the neighboring province of Campania; and to them, Christ is synonymous with civilization. This explains the obscure meaning of the title.

It was in 1935 that the author, wearing handcuffs, was escorted from the Regina Coeli prison in Rome to Gagliano. With a painter's understanding he describes the stark beauty of...